Jonathan Zittrain gave me a an advanced copy of his new book book, The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It, to look over and comment on.
This is a fantastic book and it will be an important read for years to come. I'm not going to talk about it yet (as I don’t think it is bloggable yet) but I will highlight one very interesting thing that I learned from the privacy chapter …
In 1973, the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare commission a blue-ribbon panel on computers and privacy. Their conclusions are still relevant 34 years later. They suggested five key points to follow to protect privacy:
- There must be no personal-data record-keeping systems whose very existence is secret.- There must be a way for an individual, to find out what information about him is in a record and how it is used.
- There must be a way for an individual to prevent information about him obtained for one purpose from being used or made available for other purposes without his consent.
- There must be a way for an individual to correct or amend a record of identifiable information about him.
- Any organization creating, maintaining, using, or disseminating records of identifiable personal data must assure the reliability of the data for their intended use and must take reasonable precautions to prevent misuse of the data.
